Millennium Pharmaceuticals (Cambridge, MA) unveiled two major deals in October aimed at establishing a downstream product pipeline for the company. Until now, the company has focused on developing high-throughput genomic screening platforms and identifying potential drug targets. Millennium will acquire LeukoSite (Cambridge, MA), which has an established pipeline and drugs nearing the approval stage, in a deal worth $635 million. Hardening up the product pipeline, Millennium will also reabsorb its Millennium Bio Therapeutics (MBio) subsidiary to incorporate all of its research efforts into a single pipeline. As part of this deal, Millennium will buy back the 18% stake of MBio owned by Eli Lilly and reconfigure an ongoing joint drug target discovery program between MBio and Lilly.
The purchase of LeukoSite is a quick, shrewd way for Millennium to move closer to producing products, a transition that might otherwise have taken several years. "What Millennium has is an unbelievable market capitalization based on some unproven but promising technologies [that]. . .may or may not translate down the line into products," says Charles Engelberg, analyst at AmeriCal Securities (San Francisco, CA). He says Millennium has reduced the technological risk dramatically by using its generously valued stock as currency to purchase real products. LeukoSite has three antibody therapeutics and two small molecules in various phases of clinical trials.
This is a preview of subscription content, access via your institution
